Protective eyewear has been used for years in various sports, including high speed sports such as motorcycle racing, skiing and skydiving, and contact sports such as basketball, hockey and football. More recently, similar eyewear has been used in other sports such as bicycling and running, as well as various leisure activities such as sailing and hiking. In all of these and many other activities, the participant will naturally perspire in an effort by the body to cool itself through evaporation as a result of heat internally generated from accelerated calorie burning. Most parts of the body perspire, including the facial and forehead region. When the forehead perspires, sweat will drip into the eyes, causing a burning sensation when the perspiration reaches the eyes. When wearing eyewear, perspiration can become trapped between the eye-facing surface of the lenses and the face, causing the participant to experience vision obscurities when the lenses fog up.
Several attempts at solving this problem have been proposed. As described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,240,718, a bar is attached to the eyewear frame to maintain a distance between the eyewear and the face. While such an arrangement allows an increased amount of evaporation to take place than would traditional eyewear, perspiration still reaches the eyes, causing the above described problems. Another attempted solution involves placement of an absorbent pad between the forehead and the eyewear. Such a system is commercially available as the ROTOSHIELD.TM. from Ektelon, Inc. The ROTOSHIELD.TM. absorbent pad, however, is designed only to absorb perspiration, not to facilitate evaporation, thus having limited effectiveness.
What is clearly needed, therefore, is a system affording eye protection while simultaneously preventing perspiration from interfering with a sports participant's vision.